20 November 2014

DIY Rustic Industrial Shelves

Pretty much since the day we first bought our first home, I had been talking about hanging shelves above the desk. Well, it took us over a year but we finally have shelves! Not just any shelves though... they're shelves we made.

We have lots of exposed brick and beams throughout our home that we've incorporated into our decorating. We didn't want the shelves to look too "new", we wanted them to fit into the industrial feel, and we especially wanted them to fit into our budget soooo we made our own!

Since we live in a condo and don't have a yard or a workshop or anything like that, we needed this process to be relatively simple.

Brackets: While browsing Home Depot one day we stumbled across these brackets in the closet section that were a good color and looked industrial. What we especially liked about them was that they would be safe. We knew we could hang these on the wall and put a significant amount of weight on them and they wouldn't budge.

Wood: For the actual shelf part, we ventured into the wood section of Home Depot and consulted an employee on the best type of wood for us to use. We explained what we were doing and he suggested a durable and affordable type of wood. He also suggested wood that would hold stain.

We found a stain that was similar to the color of the exposed beams in our home.

Since we didn't want the shelves to look too "new", we distressed the wood before staining by hitting it with chains and nicking it up with a hammer.

That's pretty much it!! We stained the wood first, attached the brackets, then hung them on the wall. I'm loving the way they turned out. I had fun decorating them for Halloween and I'm getting pretty excited about how they'll look for Christmas.